Moonlight Magnolia
by nothyme
Summary: Alice goes to Mississippi to find out more about her past and finds out answers to mysteries she didn't know existed. Canon couples. Later mature content.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N: Okay, so this is my first story and I'm a little unsure. I hope everyone likes it so far and I will try and be a goddess with updating, but ya know how it is....Please leave feedback and let me know what I can do to help make my readers happy!**

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_"Cause a Mississippi girl don't change her ways..."_

_~ Faith Hill_

Every time I try and remember all I can come up with are flickers: The way it smelled on a spring morning about five minutes before it rained—Noon in midsummer when the air was so moist with humidity it felt like you could cut it with a knife and the scent of gardenias hung so thick it was as if you couldn't breathe—The gray of the Gulf in the winter and the unchanging green of the leaves on the hundred year old live oaks.

The Change opens the mind up so fully that I've been told to try and remember anything from Before is like looking at grainy, black and white, silent films. One of my sisters allowed her anger to help hold on to her memories; another used her love. My brothers don't seem to care that they lost a part of their past—they hang on to the basic structure their human lives held (name, birthplace, etc.) but have allowed other parts to fade with the years. My love knows his own story as he knows how to perfectly play my body and read my emotions. He remembered his mortal life in order to survive his immortal one. My parents, too, keep their own histories almost as the cherished children they could never physically create and nourish them as their caring and compassionate natures insist they do with anything showing a hint of vulnerability. But no matter the result, my family made the choice to keep or release the more human portions of their existence. I never had a chance to decide. My mind was already so broken that the flickers are all I have left.

But _are_ they all I have left? In torturing Bella, a monster gave me something that I could never have discovered on my own: a clue. Mary Alice Brandon. Biloxi, Mississippi. A sister. A niece. A past.

Can I go back there; should I? I love my life, what it is, but I don't want to have a big blank in my head where there should be something else. I used to be someone else, something else. I want to know who that was and why I've come to be who I am. How that any different from what others have been trying to do for eons? Funnily enough, I actually have the time to figure it out.

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**Please leave some feedback so I can get the courage to continue! Thanks!**


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N: Me again. This section is longer and in a different style--I'm thinking of alternating chapters like this, the past like this, the present from Alice's perspective. That cool? No feedback yet, and that's okay, but I do feel a bit like the fat girl in the corner alone at prom; please just let me know how I'm doing so I don't attack the refreshment table and eat all the brownies.**

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_"To understand the world, one must understand a place like Mississippi..."_

_~ William Faulkner_

Summer, 1909, Biloxi, Mississippi

Two dark haired little girls sat giggling on the wide front porch of the big house. They were wearing similar white cotton dresses and had long ago shed their shoes. Every so often a gulf breeze would blow their long hair and ruffle the hems of their skirts. They were sisters—best friends—and had that undeniable bond that came with the connection of blood.

"Mary Alice! Cynthia! If you two aren't cleaned up and dressed when your Papa gets in for supper I'm gonna have both your hides!" Uh, oh. Sadie was glaring at them through the screen door.

"But Miss Sadie! We were just going to--"

"No ma'am, Mary Alice. I'm not listening. Your Mama already done told you _twice_ and you're not gonna make her ask you a third time are you?"

"No, Miss Sadie," both girls mumbled getting up, dragging their feet as they went through the door Sadie was now holding open while scowling at them. As they passed her, Sadie playfully swatted their behinds, making them shriek and start giggling again as they ran up the stairs to the room they shared.

Sadie watched the girls go shaking her head. Those two. She had lived with the family since _she_ was a little girl, her mother having been a cook for the girls' grandmother. When Agatha Ogden had married Jeffrey Brandon, Mrs. Ogden had begged Sadie to go set up house with them. Aggie wasn't what anyone would call self-sufficient—she could barely tie her own shoe let alone keep house. She wasn't happy with the arrangement, just one more black woman working to keep a white woman's home, but Sadie was a realist. This was Mississippi and a job for a barely literate black woman that paid as handsomely as Mrs. Ogden paid Sadie was not easy to come by. Plus, Aggie was a sweet woman who basically let Sadie run things as she saw fit and from the day Mary Alice was born, and then two years later Cynthia, she knew she couldn't leave. Aggie was so flighty so was incapable of taking care of children and those girls were Sadie's life. Those girls and—

A slamming door brought Sadie out of the reminiscence she had been falling into lately.

"Aggie? Sadie? Girls? Is anyone even here?" A deep booming voice chuckled as he entered through the side door that lead out to the carriage house.

"Yes, Mr. Brandon, I'm sweeping the front hall. Mrs. Brandon and the girls are dressing for dinner," Sadie called, remembering why she where she was in the first place.

A tall man with slicked down dark brown hair and light blue eyes wandered into the front hall. When he saw Sadie he smiled. A smile Sadie knew all too well. A dangerous smile. He closed the distance between them slowly—to an outsider it would appear as if nothing was amiss, simply an employer speaking with an employee.

"I've missed you today," Jeffrey said quietly, knowing only Sadie could hear.

"You shouldn't say that to me," Sadie replied, just as quietly, meaning exactly the opposite of what she said.

"But I want to."

"Want to what? Say it or miss me?"

"Say it. I never want to miss you."

"Well, you're allowed to do one, not the other," Sadie replied, looking towards the floor.  
"Good, I'll choose which one I want to do and which one I don't want to do," Jeffrey said smiling.

Sadie looked up. Oh, this was wrong. Not only wrong, but dangerous. He was dangerous. That smile, those eyes, those hands....Oh, Lord.

_Clomp, clomp, clomp_. "Papa!"

"Mary Alice! Hello, Sprite! How was your day?" Jeffrey asked, swinging the little girl up into his arms when she finished banging down the stairs.

_Just in time before something stupid happened_, Sadie thought, leaving to go to the kitchen to check with the cook and see how dinner was coming. The Brandons were a strange family, eating dinner with the children every night. _Although __I__ would rather have conversation with the girls than Aggie_, Sadie mused. It wasn't that Sadie didn't like Aggie, it was just that she was so...well, simple. Nothing mattered to her besides what the latest gossip in town was or what the latest fashion was. A man like Jeffrey wanted to talk about something else. _Or not talk_, Sadie thought with a smirk. He was always willing to talk to his girls about anything, always wanting to know the little things about their day. Not at all like his contemporaries. Sadie frowned. Sometimes she didn't know if she knew him at all. She'd lived with him for ten years and there were still little quirks she didn't understand. _You're not supposed to understand him_, she scolded herself, _you're supposed to clean his house, keep his children, and make sure his wife doesn't get herself killed crossing the street. __That's all__._

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**How's that for our first new characters, huh? We likey?**


	3. Chapter 3

_"You can never go home again, but the truth is you can never leave home, so it's all right." ~Maya Angelou_

Hurricane Katrina blew through the Gulf Coast with a fury never before seen. New Orleans flooded and the coastal communities in Mississippi were destroyed. I found myself here, barely a year after the storm's destruction, and from somewhere deep inside I felt a sadness that I could not place.

"Miss? Excuse, Miss?" The accent was like music to my ears; the slow syrupy Delta melding with the Cajun influenced Louisiana equaled a unique sound unlike anywhere else. I looked into the man's inquiring face and saw a chill come over him despite the 90 degree heat index in the sultry October night.

"Uh, can I help you?" He looked less confident that he did on his first approach, but the manners instilled by his Mama dared not to leave such a fragile looking creature alone in the night. If only he knew.

"No, sir, thank you. I'm just admiring the moonlight on the water. My husband will be joining me shortly," I responded, hoping that this would quell any further inquiries.

After a warning to "Be careful" he left, his frightened Peekapoo still growling at me.

What I was doing on that lonely stretch of beach was beginning at the beginning. The vacant lot I was standing in front of had once been the site of a white house with a wide front porch, the yard surrounded by an iron fence that morning glories wound around to bloom every September. The gate creaked an alarm to those inside it whenever someone entered and the housekeeper refused to let the gardner oil it for that very reason. The white house had once been home to two little girls with matching black pigtails, one whose eyes were as blue as the sea, the other with eyes the grey of a storm cloud.

Golden eyes looked at the lot, not seeing the foundation made bare by nature's caprice or the weeds growing where the flowers had once been lovingly tended before those doing the tending had to run for their lives. No, I saw what had been my home a lifetime ago.

It wasn't difficult to locate where I had lived or other more mundane facts about my other life. Start with the name Mary Alice Brandon. Everyone knows that a well bred Southern woman should only be in the paper twice: when she marries and when she dies. Mary Alice only made it once: June 17th, 1918, survived by Mr. and Mrs. Jeffrey Aldon Brandon and a sister, left unnamed. Marriage records show a Mr. Jeffrey Brandon, born in Greenville, Mississippi, a white man, married Mary Agatha Ogden, a white woman, April 22, 1900.

The society pages indicate it was quite an affair, the groom coming from a wealthy cotton plantation in the Delta and the bride the only daughter of the richest family in town. Miss Ogden had nine attendants, all of whom wore matching pink silk gowns and carried nosegays of sweet peas and roses. She was preceeded down the aisle by four flower girls, her nieces, and her father proudly handed her over to the debonair Mr. Brandon. The two were united in the sacrement of marriage by Father John Brandon, brother to the groom, who had been ordained fairly recently to the priesthood. After a reception for friends and family at the bride's home, the happy couple would spend three months on honeymoon at the Hotel Monteleon in New Orleans. Upon return the couple would be at home in the white that had stood on this very spot since before the Civil War.

_The wind blew through the girl's room, ruffling the lace curtains on her window._

_"Mary Alice, baby, come on, get up—sitting in bed all day solves nothing," gentle hands pulled the covers from over her face._

_"Mama sits in bed all day," the girl responded fiercely, obstinately pulling the covers back over her face._

_"Well, we all see how well that's worked for Aggie," the other woman muttered, causing Mary Alice to giggle._

The flashes were coming more often now and were clearer than ever before. I was at the beginning and I knew how the story ended. I just needed to keep filling in the in between.

**No excuses: this story is just difficult to get out of my head. If anyone is even still reading, thank you, and please don't expect a regular updating schedule. At this point I have no idea how it will go.**


	4. Chapter 4

**Another chapter for whoever is out there reading this. Hope you enjoy. I think I may own everything in this chapter besides the name Mary Alice Brandon-who knows, right?**

_A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy? ~ Albert Einstein_

Growing up as Aggie Ogden was not an easy task. The youngest child, the only girl, she was simultaneously her father's favorite and mother's cross to bear. Mary Ogden, Aggie's mother, came of age during the aftermath of the War of Northern Aggression; she remembered being hungry because of coastal blockades, wearing clothes that were falling to ribbons, and watching her four older brothers go off to fight but never returning home. She married Mr. Ogden at the ripe old age of twenty-one, enduring gossip about how she would never catch a husband, when she finally accepted the Irish immigrant's proposal. What Mary saw in the short, black-haired man who was forever squinting was potential, and under her rule Ogden's Imports became a flourishing shipping company that survived the dip in the markets and became the go-to company for anyone wishing to do business with Central and South America, along with much of the Caribbean. Good Catholic woman that she was, Mary had given birth to no less than nine sons and buried three when her daughter was born. She had hoped that Mary Agatha, called Aggie from an early age, would be as practical and levelheaded as Mary herself was, but not long after the wet nurse was dismissed and Aggie was brought more and more out of the confines of the nursery, this was not to be.

As was custom in rich Southern families at the time, Mary retained the services of one Harriet Daniel, a Negro woman whom Mary had known since childhood, to be nursemaid to Aggie. Harriet had, before the war, belonged to Mary's family, and since her mother stayed even after emancipation, Harriet stayed too. Harriet and Mary were more alike than either would admit—they had been together so long that neither could function without the other, but again, neither would admit it. Harriet had ruled over the Ogden nursery through the childhood antics of all the boys, so the day Harriet came to Mary and said, "Mrs. Ogden, something ain't right with that child," Mary knew that her prayers for Aggie wouldn't be answered.

Mary's mother Ann had never been well—whether these illnesses were real or imaginary, Mary never knew. Ann never learned to read or write and didn't know all the states in the Confederacy, but she did know the best way to hold her fan to show her pretty hands off to their advantage. The belle of the ball in her younger years, time diminished her fabled looks and her husband's chronic infidelity, with a slave no less, did nothing to help the already precarious mental state in which she resided. She saw fairies in the garden and heard angels whispering to her. She endured thirteen pregnancies, seven stillbirths and two infant deaths with aplomb, however when her sons didn't return from the war, Ann took to her bed and didn't leave it, not even for her one remaining child's wedding, until her death twelve years later. Mary resented her mother for giving up and giving in to what she saw as weakness of character. She prayed and prayed for her children to be spared this horrendous limitation but it soon became apparent that while her sons were the strong men along the lines of her father and husband, her only daughter, the child she hoped more than anything to reflect herself, would be nothing more than another Ann.

Whereas Mary enjoyed her boys and their straightforward manner, she didn't know what to do with Aggie. The girl was always daydreaming and wandering off—Harriet came to Mary one day inconsolable because she had turned her back on the girl for a few minutes to do some ironing and when she turned around Aggie had disappeared. It took the women thirty minutes to find where she had fallen asleep under a willow tree in the yard. Mr. Ogden's favoritism for the girl allowed an already weak demeanor, in Mary's opinion, to be spoiled further by giving her everything she wanted.

Harriet did what she could with the girl, making her learn to write her name, at least, and read simple sentences. It was that Aggie was stupid, she was just flighty, and however much the public desired this trait in a woman, it was most certainly not prized by Mary Ogden. When she came of age to be courted, Miss Aggie was a most sought after dance partner; her abilities in "frivolous activities," as termed by her mother, were par excellance. Her frocks were always of the latest fashion, the best fabric with the most to the minute silhouette. Her glossy black hair, inherited from Black Irish ancestors through the over-indulgent Papa, was always styled just so and topped with expensive hats imported from abroad while her grey eyes, inherited from none other than Grandmother Ann, sparkled with a feverish gaiety. What Aggie Ogden lacked in her mother's aptitude for business, she more than made up for in the social arts.

The proposal Aggie finally accepted was from a Mr. Jeffrey Brandon, of the Greenville Brandons, a rich plantation family from the Mississippi Delta that dabbled in politics as a way to spend the time. His family was Catholic, which made Mary happy, and his interest in shipping, along with plenty of investment capital, satisfied the worried Mr. Ogden.

The wedding was beautiful according to even the most critical of matrons, the society event of the season some said, and even the April rains held off long enough for the delicate looking bride to place her hand in her groom's and begin their married life together, joined by Harriet's pretty and practical daughter Sadie, retained by Mary, ever conscious of her own daughter's limitations. Over a year after the wedding, enough time to stifle even the most gossipy of gossips, the young Brandons welcomed a baby girl to add to the gaggle of Ogden grandchildren. However, what happened next could only have been predicted by none other than the Ogden family matriarch, Mary, who had long suspected the fragility of Aggie's mind, and the other women who had suffered in sororal silence.

The phenomenon now known as post-partum depression hit Aggie hard and left the newborn, named Mary Alice for her maternal and paternal grandmothers, respectively, solely in the hands of Sadie. Aggie's depression lasted for months; she refused baths, visitors, and showed no interest in the child. Mary finally took a firm hand with her daughter, told her to get out of bed, clean herself up, and do her duty as her father's daughter and husband's wife. She did as she was told, but woman who had been the talk of the town less than three years before was a shell of her former self.

The birth of her second daughter did nothing to help Aggie's state and her wanderings, a habit squashed quickly in childhood by Harriet and her mother, surfaced again. Soon the young Mrs. Brandon was not the talk of the town for her ethereal beauty that only grew as her meals became less frequent, but for her strange habit of showing up in random places at inopportune times. She began attending weddings to which she wasn't invited, having dinner in neighbors' servants' quarters, and taking walks at all hours of the night.

While Jeffrey liked to laugh off his wife's behavior as an eccentricity, Mary knew it to be something that wasn't so funny. One thing interesting did happen as a result of Aggie's new hobby: Mary Ogden finally made her peace with her mother. At least Ann had taken to her bed when her mind finally broke.


	5. Chapter 5

_For death is no more than a turning of us over from time to eternity. ~ William Penn_

A warm mist falls, saturating clothing but it goes unheeded. I'm used to the rain.

The ruins of the old hospital are deserted, not only by human but also by the various wild creatures that usually call it home. Everyone tends to be frightened by the unfamiliar.

Some windows are broken, the brick walls are beginning to crumble, and the wooden outbuildings are in complete disrepair. The front doors are bolted with a thick chain and large padlock. I smile.

Wandering down the deserted corridor I feel what can only be called déjà vu. It is not a new sensation for me but certainly different from what I am used to experiencing. This is not a place I've seen before in my head—it's somewhere that I remember.

_The doctor injected me with something—to make me more compliant no doubt. It's worked. I can hardly keep my head up as I'm wheeled through the doubled doors, let alone struggle with anyone. A sign proclaims we are in "Admitting." A nurse with a white hat gives me a condescending smile as she hands papers to…my father. He looks at me, sighs, and signs the papers._

Instinctually I know how to get where I'm going. I stop in front of the door marked 819A.

_The walls are padded and the ceiling leaks. My bed is made of iron and has a mattress thinner than my pillow was at home. The nurse exclaims about my good fortune—I won't be forced to share a room._

Another building beckons me. It is made of cinder blocks and has no windows. A wooden sign still hangs outside the door but whatever information it contained has long since disappeared to time and the elements.

_"Has she been administered a sedative?"_

_"Yes, doctor."_

_"Good. Mary Alice? Mary Alice? Can you hear me? Good. Mary Alice, we are here to help you, to rid you of these fantasies plaguing you. Nurse, could you please put the patient in restraints and make ready the items needed for the procedure?"_

_"Yes, doctor."_

The cast iron bathtubs are still in place along with the long tables, although the restraining cuffs were removed at some point. These innocuous looking items were the only remains of the torture performed in the name of mental health.

There is one place on the grounds for which I feel no connection, even though it is one of the only concrete connections I've found.

_Mary Alice Brandon_

_8-8-01 ~ 8-7-20_

It certainly is interesting to look at one's own grave.

**Please review.**


	6. Chapter 6

_"The past is never dead; it's not even past." ~ William Faulkner_

Sadie's world had suddenly stopped turning.

Three months.

She had been clean for three months.

She had taken every precaution she knew but apparently it wasn't enough. The truth of the matter was that Sadie was pregnant with Jeffrey Ogden's baby. The truth of the matter was that she was unmarried and pregnant by a white man. The truth was that there was no good option available to her.

"Sadie. What is wrong? There is something wrong," Aggie said in her slow, faint voice. Even this tiny sound caused Sadie to jump.

"Nothing, Ms. Aggie, nothing. I'm just feeling a bit faint," Sadie responded. Aggie looked deep into Sadie's eyes for longer than Sadie was comfortable with and tilted her head to the side. Aggie smoothed Sadie's hair back from her brow and gave her a kiss on the cheek.

"Whatever it is Sadie, you don't have to worry. You're an Ogden, we take care of our own," and with that Aggie floated out of the room to pick daisies from the garden.

Sadie didn't tell Jeffrey; she knew better. A white man may take a black mistress but he sure didn't take a black wife or child.

"Sadie. What have you done?" Harriet said, when Sadie told her what was happening.

"I know, Mama, I know. Don't think I don't know," Sadie said, looking at the worn wooden floor of her mother's house and wringing her hands.

"Baby, baby, my baby," Harriet said, pulling Sadie to her and hugging her tight.

"You should've heard what Ms. Aggie said. She don't know nothing and she say I don't have to worry 'cause I'm an Ogden. Silly lady," Sadie said, laughing through her tears.

Harriet was silent. Sadie pulled back and looked at her mother, who wasn't meeting her eyes.

"Mama?" Sadie asked softly.

"Don't make me tell you no lies, Sadie Mae," Harriet said sternly.

"Then don't tell 'em," Sadie responded.

"Aggie don't know what she talking about," Harriet said, turning swiftly back to the lined dried laundry she had been folding.

"Something I've learned about Ms. Aggie is that she know a lot more than people think she know. People talk in front of people like her; they think she don't understand when it's really just that she don't care," Sadie said, watching her mother's every move.

Harriet dropped the sheet she was folding.

"Baby, I never wanted to tell you this. I prayed I never would have to," Harriet whispered.

"My daddy wasn't my daddy was he?"

Harriet was silent a long time. She didn't look at her daughter.

"No. No, he wasn't. I married Jonas Daniel and he left a couple of years later for another woman. A couple of months later I found out I was having you."

"But Jonas wasn't my daddy?"

"No. I got pregnant from Patrick Ogden," Harriet said, lifting her chin up in defiance at her daughter.

Sadie was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "Well, Mama, what do I do?"

_Long time no see. I've had a child and become pregnant with another since last posting. Is anyone still reading this?_


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